


definitely not bfu rpf

by MaryPSue



Series: Almost Original [1]
Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series), Original Work
Genre: Demon Shane Madej, Gen, because I feel weird about writing rpf but this plotbunny would not die, except he doesn't know it and thinks the possibility is stupid, filed off the serial numbers but did it badly, hopefully it's not too terribly difficult to follow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 14:43:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19153138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: “It’s not a ghost, Bryan,” Zane repeats, just in case his co-host is getting cocky.“Well, maybe not,” Bryan concedes. “But itcouldbe.”“Which is more likely, that it’s really windy and the equipment is malfunctioning, or that it’s a ghost?”“Well, I think they’re equally -”“Equally likely, yeah, I’ve never heard you saythatbefore.”...Zane and Bryan, hosts of the (hit?) web seriesUnresolved, team up to investigate a mystery that hits a little closer to home than usual.





	definitely not bfu rpf

**Author's Note:**

> a thought process:
> 
> 1) I enjoy this nonfiction web series about two goofs hunting ghosts
> 
> 2) Oh this fan content about the goof who doesn’t believe in ghosts and demons being a literal demon pleases me, it is very silly and involves monsters
> 
> 3) Hm oh no I have an idea about how the skeptical goof being a literal demon could go that no one else seems to have thought of
> 
> 4) Hm oh no I have to write it myself
> 
> 5) Hm oh no that’d be RPF and I’m not comfortable writing that
> 
> 6) But this plotbunny is very complete and I like it a lot! Maybe if I just file off the serial numbers and make it original?
> 
> 7) …this plotbunny relies entirely on a thing they did on this web series that no other rational human person would ever, ever do.
> 
> 8) what if…instead of actually trying to file off those serial numbers…I just did a deliberately terrible job of it so everyone knew what I was referencing but it technically wasn’t RPF
> 
> 9) …what if…I made…everyone in the short story’s names rhyme with their real-life counterparts

It starts with static.

 

 

“Zane,” Kevin says, shaking his head, interrupting the really good bit Zane was in the middle of doing. Well, okay, maybe it was less a ‘really good bit’ and more ‘dancing around like a Looney Toon’, but still. Bryan was laughing.

“Oh, dammit,” Zane sighs, reaching up to the collar of his shirt. “Mic out again?”

“Yeah. I’m getting nothing but crackling. And this awful growl I’m pretty sure is your jacket rubbing against the mic. Are you warm enough without it?”

Zane stands still through Kevin and DJ fiddling with his mic and his coat and his shirt, and when he starts recording again, Kevin gives him a big grin and a thumbs up. But they’ve barely gotten to the part of the intro where Bryan says “…as part of our ongoing investigation into the question: are ghosts real?” before it’s back to a thumbs down.

“Don’t you dare try to tell me this is a ghost,” Zane grumbles, as Kevin adjusts his mic for the third time since they arrived on location.

Bryan just does that thing with his eyebrows and smiles directly into the camera Clark’s still rolling like he’s Jim on the Office. Zane’s not sure why anyone’s still filming. This is going to be a _lot_ of useless B-roll.

“It’s not a ghost, Bryan,” he repeats, just in case his co-host is getting cocky.

“Well, maybe not,” Bryan concedes. “But it _could_ be.”

“Which is more likely, that it’s really windy and the equipment is malfunctioning, or that it’s a ghost?”

“Well, I think they’re equally -”

“Equally likely, yeah, I’ve never heard you say _that_ before.”

 

 

The house is old, and drafty, and Zane’s mic goes out a grand total of twice more before somebody gets the bright idea to try swapping it out with Bryan’s. It takes nearly twenty minutes to get everything set up and recalibrated, but at the end of it, Zane’s recording is coming through crystal clear again.

They get five minutes into filming before Kevin cuts them off again.

“ _Seriously?_ ” Zane asks, as Kevin fiddles with the cord leading to the battery pack hooked to his waistband.

“Yeah, I thought that mic was just broken, but – hang on, let me try and replace these batteries.”

“So it’s not the microphone,” Bryan says, with a smug smile that’s just starting to turn glassy with fear. “And it’s not the wind…”

“Still doesn’t mean it’s a ghost,” Zane says, because, well, it doesn’t. “I could have picked up a big static charge from that rug in the entryway, Kevin could’ve forgotten to plug in the charger…”

“Or it could be a ghost.” When Zane doesn’t dignify that with a response, Bryan’s smile gets smugger. “Can you definitively say it _isn’t_ a ghost?”

Zane sighs, and goes to see if Kevin’s having any luck with the battery pack.

 

 

In the end, they get all of Bryan’s dialogue, about fifteen minutes of usable clips from Zane, two weird rumbling growls that spook Bryan very badly but mostly sound like heavy trucks passing by to Zane, and a whole lot of static. Even Bryan’s mic gets overtaken once or twice, drowned out in the crackle.

“Sounds like we’re talking through the spirit box,” Zane comments, his ears ringing in the sudden silence as he puts his headphones aside.

Bryan laughs at that, one huff of air that’s almost more of a sigh. “Guess that’d make us the ghosts.”

“Sounds like fun!” Zane says. “Hanging around historical sites, scaring the pants off of you and your little…freaky friends with spooky creaks and moans, not having to labour under capitalism…livin’ the dream, baby.”

“Well,” Bryan says, with that crooked grin that means he’s about to lay down a truly awful pun. “More like. _Dying_ the dream.”

“I don’t know why I put up with you,” Zane says, putting his headphones back on.

 

 

At first, the stuff Zane records in the studio is fine, so they chalk it up to wind interference on location (Zane) or the spirits lingering in the old house (Bryan) and move on. And it’s fine.

But then an entire in-studio episode about alien abductions gets eaten by static, and Bryan loses his shit.

“There’s even video distortion!” he complains to Zane, waving a hand at the offending frame. Zane peers at it, but can’t really tell what it is that’s got Bryan’s knickers in a knot. “Zane, I’m serious. I think you really did it this time. I think you pissed a spirit off enough that it latched onto you and followed us home.”

“Oh. Well, that’s all right,” Zane says. “I’ve been meaning to find something to keep the cat entertained at the apartment all day while Tara and I are out.”

Bryan looks a strange mix of ‘exasperated’ and ‘trying not to laugh’. “I’m serious!” he repeats, in the face of all the evidence. “I _told_ you not to lie down on that pentagram and dare the demon to rip out your heart. _Or_ taunt that other demon and tell it you were taking its bridge! Or talk to demons at all! Maybe we should call that exorcist we consulted again, or -”

“Or clean the camera lens,” Zane says. “Honestly, Bryan, I think you need more sleep. I don’t see anything wrong with this picture.”

“You wouldn’t,” Bryan mutters, turning back to his monitor.

 

 

The satellite radio in Zane’s car keeps dropping out the whole way home from the office, and he’s not even anywhere near any high-voltage power lines or anything. He makes a mental note to call Sirius customer support, which he knows he’ll forget by the time he gets home, and switches to the CD player.

Every CD he’s got in his glove compartment skips.

 

 

“Maybe you got magnetized somehow,” DJ suggests, when all their footage starts turning wavy and glitchy as soon as the camera cuts to Zane. “Did you get a new phone? New computer? Tara decide that what the apartment really needs to pull it all together is a big ol’ cartoonish electromagnet?”

Zane snorts hot tea out of his nose.

 

 

“Even Scully took it seriously when the shadow government gave her cancer, man,” Bryan says, when he sees the glitchy footage.

“There – okay, there are two issues with that line of logic,” Zane says. “First, cancer. That’s detectable by current medical science. It’s not exactly a matter of belief. Second, Dana Scully is a fictional character.”

“So you won’t get an exorcism?” Bryan says, sounding defeated.

“Bryan, my dear, I think you already know the answer to that one.”

 

 

The cat follows Zane around the apartment all night that night, staring up at him with big round eyes and skittering backwards with its ears flat against its head whenever he tries to pet it. Zane feeds it three Dreamies, but the cat is not appeased. All night long, it paws and paws and paws at the bedroom door.

 

 

All the fluorescent lights in the office start flickering uneasily about once every half hour. Everyone keeps their eyes up and their fingers poised over Ctrl+S.

 

 

The overhead light in the apartment kitchen starts flickering, too, and keeps flickering even after Zane changes the bulb. Tara complains it’s giving her a migraine, and ends up going back to bed, looking pale and miserable. Zane calls in that he’ll be working from home, brings her tea and Advil before setting up on the couch with his laptop.

He’s barely got the video editing program loaded before Tara sticks her head out around the bedroom door, bathrobe wrapped around her, eyes squeezed almost shut. “What is that _smell_?”

“Smell?”

“You seriously don’t smell that? It’s like something rotten.” Tara sniffs, then sneezes. “Eggs,” she decides. “Rotten eggs.”

Zane spends the next three hours on and off the phone with the landlord, trying to get an electrician to come look at their kitchen light fixture and someone to come see if there’s a natural gas leak. According to the landlord, there’s no natural gas in the building, and there won’t be an electrician until Thursday at the earliest. The landlord advises cooking by flashlight and taking the garbage out.

 

 

Zane’s working on the script for the next episode of his history show when something that must be the pipes lets out a faint, metallic knock. Three times in a row, and then silence.

Zane listens, because that’s a new apartment sound, but it doesn’t happen again, so he turns back to his laptop.

 

 

When he goes in to check on Tara, the cat’s curled up on his pillow, beside Tara’s head. It looks up when Zane inches the door open, its eyes catching the ambient light from the hall and turning into two eerie discs of green.

“Shh,” Zane says, to the cat.

The cat looks at Zane, and slowly, slowly, rises to its tiptoes. Its back arches, ears flat against its head, all its little needle teeth on display as a hiss builds in the back of its throat.

“Toby, you ass, it’s me,” Zane whispers into the dark room, but the cat just hisses louder. Zane tries taking a cautious step into the room, and the cat spits at him, shuffling back and a little sideways so that it’s directly between him and Tara.

“Okay, you little…lunatic man,” Zane mutters, backing slowly out into the hall and easing the door shut behind him. “I’ll let her sleep.”

 

 

When Zane regales Bryan with the tale of his maybe-possibly-gas leak, Bryan gets that huge glassy-eyed smile and lets out the same nervous laugh that he gets when something noisy and potentially inexplicable happens while they’re filming on location.

“You know what that is, right?” he asks, through his teeth. If Clark were here filming, Zane’s sure Bryan would be looking over his shoulder every few seconds to mug horror into the camera.

“Natural gas,” Zane says. “Which is what I’m worried about, since that can _actually_ hurt you. Or it could be a septic tank. Or a literal rotten egg. But I’m sure you’re going to say it’s sulfur, because you think it’s a demon.”

Bryan shakes his head.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you, man,” he says, still smiling like someone’s holding a gun to his head and saying they’ll shoot if he looks anything but ecstatic.

“All right,” Zane says, shrugging one shoulder. “You warned me. I think we’ve got a bigger issue, though. How’re we going to get this week’s episode out of all this glitchy junk?”

Bryan, to his credit, manages to do a full ten minutes’ worth of actual work before breaking down and asking, “Are you _sure_ you don’t want my bottle of holy water?”

 

 

“Hey guys, Bryan here. You may have noticed that my usual cohost isn’t, uh, isn’t here with me today. That’s because today’s episode of _Unresolved_ is a very…special episode. You see, it concerns…the Unexplained Electromagnetism of Zane Mattey.”

 

 

By this time, Zane’s come to expect the admonishments in the comments that he shouldn’t be ignoring such obvious evidence of the paranormal (he isn’t, because it’s not), that he shouldn’t be antagonising the spirit world (he isn’t, because it doesn’t exist), that he should be praying for forgiveness and protection (he won’t, because he doesn’t need it). This episode, however, introduces a new and very funny subset of hardcore believer comments.

“They think _I’m_ the demon,” he says, as Bryan scrolls through the comment section, a thankless job if ever there was one.

Bryan does not seem nearly as amused by this as Zane thought he would be. He looks up at Zane, like he’s never seen the guy before in his life, and asks, apparently in all seriousness, “Are you?”

“Wh- _no_? Demons aren’t real, Bryan. Besides, if I were a demon, wouldn’t we have had technical issues from the start?”

“Not if you got possessed at our last on-location.” Bryan’s staring a little too hard, and it’s making this less funny. “Zane, why _won’t_ you take my bottle of holy water? I know, I know, you don’t believe in this stuff -”

“Because it’s not real -”

“But it’d be no skin off your nose, and it would make me, your friend, feel better.”

Zane shrugs one shoulder, like he doesn’t care, though he’s starting to get annoyed. He’s not a _demon_. He’s not _possessed_. Demons – like ghosts – don’t exist.

But…Bryan’s right. Bryan _does_ believe, and this is seriously freaking him out. It’ll cost Zane nothing to give his best friend a little peace of mind. “Okay. Fine. I’ll take your holy water bottle. Got a…holy hand grenade or two you can toss in there with it?”

Bryan just gives him that hard stare, and shakes his head.

 

 

Tara’s looking a lot better when Zane gets home. The cat, curled up in her lap, takes one look at Zane and catapults itself under the couch.

“Ow,” Tara says, rubbing her thighs where the cat dug his claws in. “Oh, babe, I think the landlord must have been right, that egg smell’s gone since you took the trash out. I haven’t noticed it all day. Did you figure out what was going on with your recording gear?”

 

 

Zane puts the bottle of holy water on the nightstand. It doesn’t start spontaneously boiling or glowing or anything in the middle of the night, so he leaves it there and forgets about it.

 

 

Somebody does knock at the apartment door in the middle of the night, though, three times. Zane gets up, but by the time he gets to the door, they’re gone.

 

 

“Hey, uh, we’re always so happy and grateful to see stuff you guys’ve made for the show, but – um. Don’t vandalise stuff with our names. We’ve seen the pictures on uh – on the ‘gram where you’ve written ‘Bryan and Zane’s bridge’ on the Old Alton Bridge, and, uh…don’t do that. Not even for demon reasons – okay, not _just_ for demon reasons, we don’t need the Goatman any more pissed at us than he already is – but – that’s just rude, folks. Don’t go and vandalise the bridge.

“You can, uh, totally keep changing the Wikipedia page, though. That’s hilarious.”

 

 

Thankfully, the A/V interference slacks off enough that Zane can get back to filming before he gets replaced as host of _Unresolved_ and demoted to writing listicles about the 8 ways to tell if your houseplants are trying to unionise.

“Man, I wish people wouldn’t joke about you being a demon,” Bryan says, scrolling through the comments on their video on el Chupacabra. He’s looking for anything good they can follow up on for the _Autopsy_ segment, but it’s all people pointing out the weird growling feedback under all of Zane’s dialogue. “That shit’s not funny.”

“Well,” Zane says, looking over Bryan’s shoulder as he scrolls. The ‘Zane is a demon’ thing seems to have taken off like a lit cigarette stubbed out in a box full of fireworks. Some of these fans have some incredibly… _creative_ takes on the topography of Heaven and Hell, some of which have clearly had entirely too much thought put into them for how completely out to lunch they are _,_ and others which he’s pretty sure have been lifted wholesale from the show _Supernatural_. Zane wonders, idly, where it’s all coming from. “It’s a _little_ funny.”

Bryan tears his gaze away from the monitor to give Zane a disbelieving look, and Zane shrugs.

“Think about it. Me, the skeptic, secretly being the thing I claim doesn’t exist? You, the believer, never realising the thing you’ve been searching for evidence of has been right under your own nose the whole time? Comedy gold right there.”

Bryan’s eyes narrow, but he looks like he’s trying not to smile.

“Yeah, okay,” he says, turning back to the screen, only to immediately turn back around and fix Zane with a serious look that’s completely ruined by the big smile that overtakes it. “But you’re _not_ a demon, right?”

“Is that even a serious question?” When Bryan just raises both eyebrows and grins wider, Zane shakes his head. “Of course I’m not a – Bryan, if demons existed, which is already a big _if_ , and if I were one, which is an even bigger, more insurmountable _if_ …I’d be pretty shit at my job, wouldn’t I? All I do is try to prove demons are real on camera in front of hundreds of thousands of viewers. And if you ask all -” He gestures to the comment section. “ _These_ people, they’d say I’ve succeeded. Not to mention, I’m not sure encouraging your ridiculous conspiracy theories and enabling your…ghost habit counts as tempting anyone to sin.”

“You _are_ always tricking me into talking to the demons,” Bryan says thoughtfully, still grinning. “Taking me to haunted, evil places…”

“ _You_ dragged _me_ to that spider-infested hellhole in Mexico,” Zane points out. “And ninety percent of the other places we’ve gone.”

“Taunting them, riling them up, trying to convince our viewers that nothing bad will happen to them if they invite demons to come _kill them -_ ”

“Well, they haven’t yet, have they?”

“Inviting evil spirits to follow us home?”

“Again. They haven’t yet, have they?” When Bryan doesn’t answer, Zane crosses his arms and raises an eyebrow. “The most that’s ever happened at a location is a flashlight flickering on and off because its wiring makes the human back look well-designed. Because demons, like ghosts, do not exist. You’re safe.”

Bryan stares at Zane a moment longer, and Zane can’t resist the urge to add, “Besides, I didn’t want to be a _ghost hunter_. That was all your idea. If anything, you’re the foul tempter here.”

“Only because I wanted to prove to _you -_ ” Bryan breaks off, shaking his head and giggling under his breath, and Zane shrugs again.

“Either way, the idea of me being a demon is preposterous. It’s – it’s just _silly_.”

Bryan nods, like he agrees, and then has to ruin it by stopping and asking, “But you’re not one, right?”

“For the love of – No, Bryan. I am not a demon.”

“Okay,” Bryan says, spinning his office chair back to face the monitor. “Just checking.”

He scrolls in blissful silence for all of thirty seconds before spinning back to face Zane. “But if you _were_ a demon, you’d tell me, right?”

“Bryan,” Zane sighs. “Yes. If it makes you feel better, I promise I will tell you if I ever happen to be a demon. Now can we _please_ do our job?”

 

 

The alarm clock on the bedside table is casting a sinister red glow over the pillow when Zane blinks awake. The numbers on its face read 3:00. Zane tries to focus on what had woken him, but it’s gone. If he concentrates, he thinks he can remember knocking, like someone was at the front door, but he’s not sure if that was real or part of the dream.

For some reason, he finds himself thinking of the first batch of ghost-hunting trips he and Bryan had taken. It was something Bryan had said at their last stop, the so-called demon house where their flashlight had so spectacularly malfunctioned. 3 AM. The devil’s hour.

Unbelievable. All this demon crap is actually starting to worm its way into Zane’s brain. Next he’ll be consulting the damn spirit box to find out what colour shoes to wear with blue pants or some such hornswoggle. Zane sits up, careful not to disturb Tara or the covers she’s hoarding, and grabs the bottle of water off the bedside table, twisting off the cap. One quick sip to wash the sleep-stank out of his mouth, then back to –

Zane doesn’t get a chance to finish that thought.

He yelps out loud, and spits furiously back into the bottle, scrubbing at his mouth with the back of his hand. The inside of his mouth feels like he just took a big slurp of a sandpaper-ghost pepper smoothie. Maybe laced with vinegar. And broken glass.

His first, bizarre thought is that the water bottle must be full of acid, even though the flimsy plastic hasn’t corroded at all and there’s absolutely no logical reason why anyone, Zane himself included, would have put acid in a bottle of water and left it on his bedside table.

Still. Even if it isn’t acid, it _burns_ and he needs to rinse it out of his mouth _now_. Zane stumbles out of bed, tripping over the covers and dropping the water bottle on the rug. He staggers into the bathroom, flicking on the light and beelining for the sink.

Zane splashes his face, takes a huge mouthful of tapwater and gargles it before spitting into the sink. He rinses and repeats until the burning fades to a mild sting, like he’s just eaten a good jalapeno.

Zane takes a deep breath, and lets it out slowly. He gives his face one last splash before straightening up, breathing a sigh of relief.

It sticks in his throat at the sight of his reflection.

The angry red blisters on his lips and at the corners of his mouth are already starting to close before Zane’s eyes. Eyes which seem to be glowing.

Zane carefully does not freak out. He blinks a couple of times, in case he’s got – maybe sleep, or something, trapped in his eye. When the vision doesn’t go away, he leans in closer to the mirror, pulling down on the lower lid of his right eye with one finger, trying to see if the bright red colour goes all the way back. Oh, sure, it _looks_ like it’s glowing red in the dim light from the bathroom light fixture behind him at three in the morning, but what’s more likely: that Bryan was somehow right about demons (or Zane’s been the victim of a B&E by a mad poisoner and special-effects artist), or that Zane’s burst a couple of important blood vessels in his eyes and the whole sclera is flooded? Technically, there aren’t any pain receptors in the eyeball itself, so theoretically it could happen without Zane noticing, probably –

His bared eyeball itches, drying out, and Zane blinks again without thinking. When he opens his eyes again, they’re back to their usual brown and white. He blinks another few times for good measure, but his eyes stay normal. And the blisters around his mouth are gone, too, the pain nothing but a memory.

“Oh,” Zane says, rather anticlimactically, to his reflection. “Dreaming. Okay.”

He gives a couple more blinks, to make sure the illusion doesn’t come back, then dries off his face and flicks the light off, heading back to bed.

 

 

“Oh, what the hell is _that_?”

Zane blinks awake. There’s sunlight hitting his face and Tara is standing by his side of the bed, scowling down at something on the carpet.

Zane rolls over to look at it. It takes him a moment to work out what he’s seeing. It looks like a blob of clear, melted plastic, streaked with blue and white through its bubbled, warped surface.

It almost looks like the remains of a water bottle, if whatever it was holding boiled inside it.

Zane looks up at the bedside table. The clock glows a red 7:28. The bottle of water he’d left sitting beside it is no longer there.

“No idea,” he says, finally. “Better chuck it before Toby gets into it, though.”

Tara nods, starting to bend down, but stops with her head about level with Zane’s, wrinkling up her nose. “Do you smell – there that rotten-egg smell is again!”

“I’ll call the landlord,” Zane says.

 

 

They’re shooting the raw footage for an episode on the Fresno Nightcrawler (Nightcrawlers? It sounds like there were at least two of them) at work. Bryan’s prepped his usual batch of malarkey – though, Zane will say, it’s always well-researched and thoroughly entertaining malarkey – and Zane tries to counter it with his usual witty barbs and intelligent retorts. But Bryan calls cut just as they’re starting to get to the good part – that is, the part where Bryan has to try to offer a rational explanation for disembodied walking pants.

“Nuh uh,” Bryan says, shaking his head. “This isn’t working. Dude, what’s gotten into you today? You didn’t even give me shit for that denim pun.”

“Denim pun?” Zane asks, blinking.

“See? That’s exactly what I mean,” Bryan says. “How – how did you not catch that? Even _I_ knew that one was terrible!”

“Oh, yeah,” Zane says. “Sorry.”

Bryan gives him a squint. “Are you all right?”

“Hm? Oh, fine.”

Bryan squints harder.

“A little distracted,” Zane admits. “Didn’t sleep too well last night.”

Bryan squints even harder. “Still got my holy water?”

“Don’t start,” Zane says, rolling his eyes.

 

 

Zane’s just starting to prep dinner – something from a mail-order meal box that he’s never heard of but that sounds tasty and has chicken in it – when he hears the knocks. There’s one, a little hesitant, followed quickly by two more, sounding louder and more confident.

Zane pauses in the middle of chopping cabbage, but he can’t hear anything else. Even the cat isn’t tearing around causing havoc. Probably it’s under the couch, which is its new favourite place to hide, and to hiss and claw at unprotected ankles from whenever Zane gets too close.

Zane shrugs, and turns back to the meal prep, but he’s barely picked up the knife before the knocks come again. Three times. Loud and clear as a bell. Actually, a little _like_ a bell – there’s a slight metallic quality to the noise that Zane can’t quite pin down.

He puts the knife down.

There’s nobody visible on the other side of the peephole in the apartment door. Zane undoes the deadbolt and swings the door open anyway, hoping he can just stick his head out and see if whoever thinks it’s funny to come knock on his shit at all hours is still visible as they book it away down the hall.

But that’s not quite what happens. Instead, Zane takes one step out of the apartment before realising the hall light must’ve gone out. It’s pitch-dark out here, like the light from the apartment isn’t even falling through the door, and cold as balls. A little chill breeze wafts across his face and skitters down the back of his neck, raising goosebumps up his arms. It smells of green and water, and that’s when Zane realises he isn’t in his apartment building anymore. The sheer sense of vast, open space around him, the sparkle of stars overhead, the soft rustle of the breeze through the leaves, the creak of the old wooden slats under his feet –

“Oh my god.”

Zane’s thoughts exactly, but he wasn’t the one who said it.  

The girl who’d spoken is standing frozen, staring with wide eyes directly at the spot where Zane’s standing. Her friend starts to turn at the sound of the first girl’s voice, but then freezes in place as well, apparently at the sight of Zane. One of her hands is curled into a fist, the knuckles poised to rap on – Zane blinks – the paint-peeling girder of the truss supporting the short bridge they’re all standing on.

“Oh _fuck_ ,” the second girl says, seeming to read Zane’s mind. “Oh shit, oh fuck. Oh my god.”

“Hey, are we -” Zane starts to ask, taking a step forward, and the first girl lets out a shriek in operatic high C, a shriek that startles a few winged shadows out of the tops of the trees on the riverbank. The echoes haven’t even started to die away when she and her friend both turn and book it. Their flashlight beams bounce away down the bridge as they both run, the wild swinging lights illuminating snatches of truss, tree, boards, bats, flying red and gold hair. Almost before Zane knows it, the thunder of their footsteps on the wooden bridge turn into the slap of running feet against bare dirt. Somewhere in the dark on the other side of the bridge, there’s one, two slams of a car door, the grumble of an engine kicking to life, and headlights briefly throw the bridge into sharp, bright relief before veering wildly off into the night.

Zane is left standing at the end of the bridge, blinking away purple afterimages and trying to make sense of what the hell just happened.

 

 

Bryan’s voice sounds groggy when he picks up his phone, like he was asleep or more than halfway there when it rang. “H’lo?”

“Bryan, can you come get me?”

“Wh- yeah, sure.” The clunking and clattering in the background is probably Bryan fumbling for his glasses. “Where are you?”

Zane looks around him, at the quiet, dark trees. “Um, Texas.”

There’s a single loud _thump_ from the other end of the line, and then quiet.

“Bryan?” Zane asks.

Bryan sounds completely awake now. “What the fuck are you doing in _Texas_?”

“Believe me,” Zane says, “I’m wondering the same thing.”

He’s standing in the middle of the bridge. It’s colder out here, out of the shelter of the trees, but he just feels more comfortable there. Safer. The Uber’s going to take half an hour to get out here, and the rustling in the bushes was really starting to get to him. He hasn’t forgotten what Bryan said about cults and sacrifices in this area, or the rustling they heard when they were out here for their on-location shoot. And ghosts and demons might not be real, but the people who believe in them sure are, and when those people also have big knives and very little compunction about what they use them on, it’s only common sense to steer clear.

“Oh my god,” Bryan sighs into the phone, and Zane has to admit that being able to hear his best friend’s voice is also very reassuring. “Only you. How did you get yourself out there, that you can’t get yourself back?”

“Bryan,” Zane says. “Please. I don’t have my wallet, I’m just lucky I had the Uber app to get me back to civilisation, there are no AirBNBs for miles -”

“What? Where _are_ you?”

Zane bites his bottom lip. There’s no way to do this without Bryan freaking out and jumping to ridiculous conclusions, but Tara had assumed it was a joke and hung up on him, and Zane doesn’t know who else he can call about something like this in the middle of the night. “So. You remember that little – little road trip we took out to a nice hiking trail in Denton County?”

There’s a moment of ominous silence.

“You’re standing on the Goatman’s Bridge, aren’t you,” Bryan says.

“I’m standing on the Goatman’s Bridge,” Zane agrees, because what else is he going to say?

There’s a long, slightly muffled sigh from the other end of the phone, like Bryan is dragging a hand down his face.

“That’s a twenty hour drive, Zane,” he says, at last.

Zane shrugs, before remembering that Bryan can’t see him. “I’m not going anywhere.”

 

 

Bryan doesn’t say anything when he pulls up in front of the bus station, just flashes the headlights twice and pokes his head out the driver’s side window. Zane gratefully flops into the passenger seat and turns up the heat as far as it will go.

They manage to make it back to the highway before either of them says anything. Bryan keeps his eyes fixed on the road, not looking over at Zane, not acknowledging his presence. The radio hisses and pops static at them until Zane reaches over and turns it off.

“Thanks for coming all the way out here,” he says, mostly to fill the sucking silence. “I tried to get the bus, but they wouldn’t take ApplePay.”

Bryan does not ask what the fuck Zane was doing twenty hours from home, standing on a reputedly haunted bridge in a totally different state from his apartment, which is a small mercy. His knuckles do go white on the steering wheel as he says, “You never answered my question. How did you get out here without your wallet in the first place?”

“Not sure,” Zane says, because it’s the truth. And then, because he’s had several hours in the dark with only his thoughts and possibly a serial murder cult for company, and because he’d much rather think about what could have happened to him than what might _still_ happen to him, “I probably wandered out here in a fugue state.”

Bryan slams on the brakes so hard that for a moment, Zane thinks they’ve hit something in the road. He grabs at the handle on the door for support as the SUV veers sharply right and comes to a rolling halt on the shoulder of a dirt road, half-in and half-out of the woods.

Bryan’s breathing hard, and he slaps Zane’s hand away when Zane reaches over to see if he’s okay. “What the _fuck_!” he yells, and slams the flats of both hands against the steering wheel.

The blare of the horn startles them both, and for a moment, the inside of the SUV is silent.

“ _Fugue state!?_ ” Bryan finally shouts, at the windshield.

“It’s the only logical -”

“No! _Fuck_ your logic! Your eyes were fucking _glowing_!”

“Mass hysteria,” Zane says, feeling a little more confident about this one. At least it’s a subject he’s a little more familiar with the mechanics of.

“ _Mass fucking hysteria?!?_ ”

“All of those fans -” Zane starts, but Bryan holds up a hand with the palm facing Zane and shakes his head.

“No, goddamnit, you don’t get to fucking – _Unresolved_ your way out of this one! I know what I saw, and it wasn’t mass _fucking_ hysteria!”

“Well, we already talked about this, I don’t think you exactly get up in the morning thinking, uh, ‘hm, I have some empty space in my calendar, think I’ll schedule in a little mass hysteria for Tuesday’ -”

“ _Fuck_ you, Zane!” Bryan finally turns to face Zane, and – oh. Oh, he looks bad. He looks very upset. Zane may have miscalculated here. “This isn’t a – a stupid _bit_! This is our real, actual _lives_ here!”

Zane lets all that sit in the air between them for a moment, lets that settle into the dust covering the dashboard. Bryan’s breathing hard, but he doesn’t say anything else, waiting to see what Zane’s got to say for himself.

“I know,” Zane says, finally, testing the response on his tongue and finding it to be true. “Do you think that just ‘cause I don’t think this is anything to do with – spirits, or demons, that I’m not scared too? I found myself in another _state_ tonight.” There’s some kind of joke to be made here about fugue states and Texas state, but this isn’t really the time to go trying to tease it out. “With no idea how I got here and no way to get food or shelter or home. I’m not – being…flip, or sarcastic, or trying to dismiss you. I actually think I must have found my way out here in a fugue state, maybe I hitchhiked, I don’t _know_! I can’t remember anything between opening my apartment door and stepping onto the bridge! I don’t have any other way to explain that!”

He plunges forward, before Bryan can do that thing he does and grin like Zane not knowing the rational explanation means there isn’t one. “ _And_ I’ve had at least one hallucination, and that means – it all adds up to something wrong in my brain. Maybe mental, maybe physical. Do you think I’m not taking this seriously? I’m scared as hell! I’m fucking terrified! And I’m not going to accuse _you_ of not taking it seriously because you think it’s _demons_ , but right now, that commitment’s being seriously tested!”

Bryan’s silent for a moment, and Zane flinches, internally. So the 180 from ‘joke about it to make it smaller and less frightening’ to ‘you want serious, we can do serious’ might have been a bit too much mood whiplash.

He really hopes he hasn’t insulted Bryan. Bryan’s one of his best friends, and even their ongoing disagreement about what constitutes demonstrable scientific evidence of life after death hasn’t put a damper on that friendship. But Zane knows how the frustration of not being able to convince someone of your own convictions can add up and boil over, and he really doesn’t want this to be the final straw between them.

Also, he really needs Bryan to drive him home.

But when Bryan does open his mouth, what he says isn’t anything Zane’s expecting. “What hallucination?”

“What?”

“You said you’d had at least one hallucination. What was it.”

Zane shrugs one shoulder. “Knocking, all over my apartment. And something I thought was a very vivid dream after I accidentally drank your holy water.”

“You _drank_ my -”

“Accidentally! Look, I’ll get you some more.”

But Bryan’s already moved on, if the way he’s frowning is any indication. “So what was _that_ hallucination?”

Zane suddenly feels like he imagines people with stage fright must feel when they’re put on the spot to sing karaoke.

“That it burned my mouth,” he finally admits. “And my eyes glowed. But we can’t test that now, because you’ve heard about it and you’re obviously part of this mass -”

“If you say ‘mass hysteria’ one more time, I’m going to use your travel tea mug for black coffee,” Bryan threatens.

“You _wouldn’t._ I’d never get the taste out!”

“Oh, don’t test me. You have no idea what I’m capable of.” Bryan wags a finger in the air between them. “And – hang on. I saw your eyes glowing _before_ you told me about this. So that’s two independent sightings of the same phenomenon -”

“Don’t start,” Zane groans.

Bryan shrugs, with that too-innocent face he likes to wear when he doesn’t have anything concrete but he wants to make Zane look like the fool for _not_ believing that the ghost of an alien possessed the family cat.

“I’m going to the doctor as soon as we get back,” Zane says, warningly. “You’re not going to talk me out of it.”

Bryan shrugs again, a normal shrug this time without any trace of smugness. “Wasn’t even gonna try. Believe me, if it turns out you have a brain tumour or a – cog out of alignment, I want them to catch it right away. But – would you please at least consider also consulting the exorcist?”

Zane bites his bottom lip. On the one hand, it should be harmless, but on the other – “I don’t want to encourage the delusion. I was there for that Exorcism of Anneliese Whatserpickle episode. I have the bee sting scars to prove it.”

Bryan snorts, but he doesn’t argue. “Just…think about it. Please?”

Zane looks out the window. Somewhere out in those woods, the Old Alton Bridge is sitting, waiting for carts and horses and feet that will no longer cross it. He thinks, briefly, about how stupid he’d thought a demon named Steve was. The mere idea of a demon named Zane is objectively even stupider.

But –

The memory of the girl’s raised fist, ready to knock on the bridge, comes sharply back to him. Three knocks, he’d been hearing, on the pipes and the apartment door.

Zane and Bryan had each knocked on the bridge three times, when they were shooting on location, because it was supposed to summon the Goatman. Steve. The demon who owned the bridge.

The bridge Zane himself had loudly declared he’d stolen by the end of the episode. The bridge that thousands – maybe even hundreds of thousands – of people had agreed that yes, he owned, and they’d alter both bridge and documentation to prove it.

He glances over at Bryan, sees him staring straight out into the dark woods with his jaw set, and feels a little cold zap of fear followed by something soft. The girl who’d been about to knock had looked like that, just before she’d turned and run. She’d seen something when she looked at Zane that had scared her badly enough to run like hell.

But so had Bryan. Bryan, who’s so easy to get worked up, who hates everything to do with demons, who for all that he would love to have evidence of ghosts on camera, would really rather be left alone by them completely. Bryan, who had willingly dropped everything and driven all the way to Texas, back to a bridge that he fully believes is haunted by something powerful and evil that he and Zane had personally pissed off, without even a camera crew for backup or an excuse. Bryan, who sincerely believes in all this demon stuff, had seen his best friend turned worst nightmare advance out of the darkness towards him, complete with glowing red eyes.

And he hadn’t run. He’d stayed, and waited, and worried. About Zane. For Zane.

Zane shakes his head. He still doesn’t really believe that what’s going on is _demons_ , but – if Bryan does, and it’d make Bryan feel better –

“Okay,” he says, and Bryan’s jaw unclenches, just a little. “Yeah. Let’s give the Father a call, too.”

“Okay,” Bryan says. “Good. You know, I’m gonna hold you to that.”

He jerks the key in the ignition, and the SUV rumbles back to life. Bryan shifts into reverse, and glances back over his shoulder, but pauses, looking up to meet Zane’s eyes.

“So,” he starts, with the beginnings of a shit-eating grin stealing across his face, “does this mean we can say that the existence of demons has now been officially -”

“If you even think about saying ‘Resolved’, I will punt you like a football,” Zane warns.

Bryan just grins, and turns the SUV around.


End file.
